 Hello, I'm Baroness Brown. I chair the Adaptation Committee of the Climate Change Committee. So thank you very much for joining us today and a warm welcome to this event to launch our progress report to Parliament on adaptation. This is our biennial assessment of how the government is responding to the changing climate, focused on England due to the requirements of the Climate Change Act. It provides an assessment of progress at the end of two national adaptation programmes. The second national adaptation programme covered the period of 2018 to 2023. And it also looks ahead to the third national adaptation programme, which we expect to be published this summer. But we haven't forgotten, of course, about the other nations of the United Kingdom. We also have reports coming out later this year focused specifically on progress in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. And while the impacts of climate change are local, all parts of the UK are facing similar and growing challenges with responding to climate change. Last week's IPCC synthesis report of the sixth assessment report highlighted the impacts communities around the world are experiencing today from flooding, heatwaves, droughts to impacts on the food supply chain to damage to infrastructure. It told us that the risks of climate change are larger and are coming faster than previous assessments had indicated. And it also highlighted that every increment of warming means climate extremes will become more widespread and more pronounced. While risks from climate change will increasingly interact with other risks, creating compound and cascading risks that are more complex and more difficult to manage, such as those risks to our food supply chains. However, the report stressed that we can still make the changes necessary to cut emissions to prevent the worst scenarios of climate change. Though even if we take the actions required, we're likely to exceed 1.5 degrees quite possibly in the early 2030s. And we need to remember that the temperature goes on rising for the next 30 years or so. Temperatures go on rising, driving climate change until we meet that net zero target. So there's a lot of climate change still to come even if we're on a good net zero pathway. But if we fail to cut emissions, the likelihood of abrupt or irreversible changes increases with higher global warming levels and our ability to adapt becomes increasingly limited. The change in climate is of course something we're increasingly experiencing in the UK. And last year, we started the year with Storm Arwen and the following storms leaving a million people without power for a week. That was followed by a heat wave in the summer with 40 degrees C temperatures leading to disruption in the National Health Service leading to 3,000 or so heat related deaths, drought, wildfires, electricity system problems and blackouts. And then last week, only last week in Norfolk, we heard the very sad story of people losing their homes as they had to be destroyed or pushed over the cliff because they'd become dangerous due to coastal erosion. And then last night, reading the evening standard as I walked home, there was a piece talking about climate change being part of the impact on food prices, contributing to the very high rates of food price inflation that we're seeing because of all the fruit and vegetables that we import from places that are sensitive to climate change overseas. So climate change is definitely with us. And we need action and we need it urgently. The IPCC report itself stressed the importance of accelerated implementation of adaptation in the near term but climate adaptation continues to receive significantly less attention than efforts to reduce the UK's greenhouse gas emissions. Just as we did two years ago in our report then, we find in this year's assessment that the UK's government current approach to adaptation policy is not leading to delivery on the ground. And there are significant policy gaps that remain and must be addressed. Indeed, we could say that we've seen a lost decade on adaptation and action absolutely cannot be delayed further. To do so, we'll lock in more damaging impacts and threaten the delivery of other key government objectives including net zero. This government has to step up and take a lead on adaptation. The government's lack of urgency is increasingly in stark contrast to people's experience. So let me take you through what's coming up this morning. Firstly, our chief executive Chris Stark will look at the opportunity the government has this year to get adaptation action back on track with the upcoming third national adaptation program. Then our head of adaptation, Richard Miller, will present our assessment of progress across the economy over the past two years. Richard will also introduce a new framework we've developed for monitoring delivery of adaptation action. We then have an audience Q&A where Richard and I will be joined by our fellow adaptation committee member, Professor Natalie Seddon. The Q&A will be moderated by India Bork, the environment correspondent of the new statesman. So some information I want you to concentrate really hard on, we'll be using Slido for the Q&A. The code to take part should appear in front of you now. Go to slido.com and enter that code to make sure that you can take part. The other thing we really do want you to do is upvote the questions, the ones that you like so that we can make sure we answer the most popular questions during the Q&A. So I'll now pass on to Chris so that we can get started on the rest of the program. Thank you. Thanks so much, Julia. Today we're publishing our assessment of the state of play on adaptation policy and planning in England. And the messages here are applicable to other parts of the UK too. We've reached a point when it's really impactful to ignore the changes in the climate that the UK is now experiencing. The first ever 40 degree day last summer was a shock to many, but the signs of climate change are really everywhere now. So I think the time has come for a more realistic discussion about what the country is actually doing to prepare, to adapt, to become more resilient to these changes that we are seeing. They're going to intensify into the future. And these effects of climate change are fundamental to the way that our economy and our society works. And bluntly, do we have a policy program to match the scale of this challenge? No, we do not. And sadly, I don't think it's even controversial to say that. The UK government's current program for adaptation is the National Adaptation Programme II, NAP II, as we call it. In a second, Richard Miller, our adaptation lead will walk us through the findings of our latest assessment of adaptation progress under NAP II. But I'm going to open by stating the obvious. NAP II is not good enough. It has been ineffective. It hasn't delivered actions anywhere close to the levels needed to address most climate risks effectively. It's partial. It didn't even consider all of the risks flagged in our corresponding climate change risk assessment, the CCRA. And fundamentally, it lacks ambition. It has not, sadly, been the vehicle to embed adaptation across government to drive an effective overall response to the challenges that we now face from climate change. So we need better. And we need this issue to be hoisted right up the priority list for government as this parliament comes towards its end and another one comes into sight. This summer, the UK government will publish its third national adaptation program, NAP III, setting out, we hope, the actions it's going to take to address climate change risk. And I hope it's going to change the story. This is the chance to break the cycle of underwhelming policy response, to treat adaptation to climate change with the importance that it deserves. I give it the urgency that the people in this country are demanding, especially after the weather extremes of last year. And I think the CCC has a role in this, too, in making that happen. We've chosen to publish this progress report early so the government has enough time to consider it ahead of constructing NAP III. What do we need to see from NAP III to improve things? Well, we've got six high-level requirements for the next program, which I'll just walk you through now. We need a vision, first of all, and here I might contrast things with the other part of our role in the CCC on Net Zero. For Net Zero, we know what the end goal looks like. Net Zero by 2050 in the UK is something we can model, we can understand, we can build detailed pathways towards scenarios for it. But what does a well-adapted UK look like? Well, I don't think we have that. So pathways and progress towards that kind of goal are very hard to construct in the absence of a clear goal and target. The second thing we need is ambition. I've already mentioned that. The government's plan needs to look beyond what's already happening towards what actually needs to happen so that we can enable that with action now. Very much learning the lessons from the planning for Net Zero as well. Thirdly, it's going to focus on delivery. NAP III has to have effective cross-government governance structures that needs to stretch, of course, into other parts of the UK too so that we see all relevant parts of government engaged, collectively owning, delivering on these very interlinked adaptation challenges across multiple sectors. It's going to have a fuller scope. Unlike NAP II, NAP III should be a comprehensive response. All of the risks covered, all of them identified, all of them with actions against them. Our climate change risk assessment from 2021 highlighted eight priority risks, but we've actually identified a total of 61 risks facing the UK from climate change. And we can't ignore climate risks elsewhere in the world either. We're exposed to those risks through supply chains. There are a host of other connections to places beyond the UK's borders. It's one of the most important routes through which climate change can impact on our economy and our society. So it needs to be included in this program. And it has to be more effective ways to monitor progress. NAP II didn't include an effective way to track progress on adaptation. A functioning monitoring and evaluation system is really vital for NAP III to drive delivery more effectively. That reporting and monitoring has to also extend to a broader group of important organisations outside of government, particularly the critical infrastructure owners. They also need to report on the climate risks they face and how they're approaching the challenge of making their assets resilient and adapting to the risks that we face. And finally, it needs to be a living strategy. It needs to be a living program, one which develops over time. The next NAP really needs to be implemented and improved continuously across the entire five-year period with mechanisms to strengthen those areas where we see gaps. And of course, it needs for that to happen, long-term stable resource within government to manage it. We haven't got that at the moment. So today's report, which is very much something that can be read as a couple with our assessment of climate change risks from 2021, lays down the gauntlet. So much more needs to be done to improve adaptation and resilience in this country. And I'm looking forward, I suppose, to seeing what the government has for us in store next summer when it responds. Now, over to Richard Miller, who's going to take us through the more detailed findings of our report. Thanks, Chris. The starting point for our assessment is, as always, the knowledge that the effects of climate change are here and now, including in the UK. The UK's climate is now already noticeably warmer than just a few decades ago, with the last decade around three quarters of a degree warmer than a typical year around 1990. UK's 10 warmest years have all occurred since 2003, with 2022 being the warmest ever. Climate change is also shifting the extremes of UK temperature as well as the average conditions, with the highest temperatures seen over the year now being warmer and reach more often. The effects of these increasingly extreme heat waves was brought home by the extensive impacts caused by the record-breaking heat wave last summer. In mid-July, temperature records were smashed across large parts of the country, leading to the warmest ever day in the central England temperature record, one of the world's longest-running observations of the climate, with some stations even exceeding 40 degrees Celsius. This was the first time that level had been passed in the UK. This heat wave and the heat waves that followed in August led to nearly 3,000 additional deaths, highest number ever for this country. We also saw record numbers of wildfires, putting some fire services under extensive pressure, and the hot and dry conditions led to widespread drought, impacting on ecosystems and agriculture, and causing water restrictions to be imposed by water companies. The events of the last year highlight just how exposed and vulnerable we can be to the weather extremes in the UK, even today. Many of these damaging weather extremes will be made worse by climate change. Heat waves will be hotter and droughts will common under the hotter and drier summers expected in future with climate change. Wetter and warmer winters and continually rising sea levels will raise flood risks in other parts of year too. These ongoing changes in the UK's climate already pose risks to people, ecosystems, infrastructure, society, and the economy. Tackling them now is an urgent challenge. It is not enough just to plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We have to adapt as well. The report we published today is our Bay annual assessment of progress in adapting to these current and expected climate changes as required under the UK's Climate Change Act. This report focuses primarily on adaptation efforts falling under the UK's National Adaptation Program, the government's flagship program to have proactively prepared the country for the effects of climate change. In this report, we have evolved the monitoring framework that we used for climate change adaptation to provide more focus on tangible changes that we'll need to see across society to be fully climate resilient to the changes global climate will bring. We use the structure of our monitoring within each sector to structure our assessment of adaptation progress. As an example of the monitoring map, here we have the map for adaptation to climate change in the water sector. In order to ensure that a plentiful supply of water continues to be available for use in houses and businesses, despite the increasingly drought-prone climate we'll see in future, we identify several required outcomes that need to be delivered. Firstly, demand for water will need to fall. This means great use of water-efficient appliances and behavioral changes to minimize unnecessary water usage, particularly at times of water stress. The water system will also need to be much more efficient with wastage of water through leaks and bursts across the network of pipes drastically cut. The increasing drought risk, particularly in the south and east of England, will mean that there will be a need for new supply of water to these regions. That might be new water storage, such as reservoirs, which would need to be created sustainable or interconnections that could allow water to be transferred from one region to another when required. Finally, infrastructure systems are becoming increasingly interconnected, meaning extreme weather and climate change could cause disruptions towards supply through impacts on connected infrastructure, particularly the power supplies. Identifying and managing these interdependencies is the key part of being climate resilient. This monitoring map structure allows us to examine evidence available for each of our key outcomes that we identify. For example, to assess reducing water demand, one of the things we can look at is progress towards the existing water demand reduction targets. Here we can see that water use per person has been increasing in recent years and projections for the future are not aligned to the existing targets. Similarly, when we look at evidence for the improved water system performance outcome, we can see that leakage from the water system has only decreased very slightly since our last progress assessment in 2021 and there has been little change in leakage from the public water supply system over the last 10 years. We also provide a more granular model of the enabling conditions necessary to achieve these outcomes and identify a number of roles that public policy needs to play to bring them about. For adapting with the water supply, key enablers include data and monitoring, funding and investment, engagement in education and strong governance. Key asks of policy include legislation and regulation, strong standards, provision of finance and provision of information and reporting. We look for evidence on the extent to which these are in place within the report. To document progress on the changes we identify within these sectoral monitor maps. We score each outcome with two separate scores. One score is for delivering implementation where we set available evidence on whether we are making progress towards each of these key adaptation outcomes and one score is for plans and policies where we look at to what extent the key policy milestones needed to deliver these outcomes are in place and functioning effectively. So what's our assessment found? Focusing first on adaptation within the UK's land, ecosystems and food. Habitats and ecosystems do need to be in a healthy ecological state to be resilient to climate changes. However, the available indicators for the overall ecological health of terrestrial and freshwater habitats are mostly either stagnant or declining with a more mixed picture for marine and coastal habitats. New environmental policy, such as statutory targets, environmental improvement plans and public money for public good approaches are welcome and could make an important difference to climate resilience but key details on funding and implementation remain unknown. Meaning it's too early to tell what impact these will make. On our working lands and seas which means agriculture, forestry and fisheries there are still some key policy gaps with no overall plan of how agriculture will be helped to remain productive despite the climate changes. In contrast, adaptation planning in the forestry and fisheries areas are more advanced but available evidence does suggest a mixed picture of their success in improving resilience on the ground. While enabling agriculture here in the UK to adapt is a key part of a climate resilient food system we are also exposed to climate change impacts through the food we import which is currently around half of what we eat in the UK today. The lack of reporting on climate risks by large food companies is currently preventing a full understanding of the systemic risk on climate change to our food supplies and recently increased levels of food insecurity if maintained could amplify the effects of food price spikes including those driven by climate change. Within the UK's infrastructure sectors planning for climate change is more advanced within the water sector and the UK's rail and strategic road networks but even in these areas evidence of improved climate resilience on the ground are limited with insufficient progress over recent years against water demand reduction targets and leakage improvements and increased evidence of weather related disruption on transport networks. The availability of key data is also a barrier to understanding adaptation efforts in some important infrastructure sectors such as telecoms and ICT, ports and airports with only very partial information available preventing a systemic assessment of climate risk today. Government will need to be working with these sectors to identify and develop key indicators and tracking data sets over the coming years. Across the board infrastructure operators are also struggling to account for the connections between infrastructure systems and adaptation planning. These interconnections mean that climate impacts in one sector and have knock-on impacts in others. Currently there are not clear responsibilities and mechanisms for cross-government collaboration on this issue which is needed to ensure a more systemic assessment of interdependency risks. Consistent minimum resilience standards across sectors and forced through remits for climate resilience sector regulators are also largely absent. Within urban areas, adaptation planning is generally credible for river and coastal flooding. The improvements in additional funding are required to address the risks surface water flooding which is often caused by the very heavy episodes of summer rainfall that will increasingly see in the future. The planning system is currently failing to adequately incorporate climate risk. New homes are still being built in areas expected to be significant future flood risk and opportunities to tackle heat and flood risk together. For example, by the increase in trees and water in urban designs, are generally missed in plans for new developments. At the level of individual buildings, overheating is now included in regulations for new homes. An important step forward to help prevent the locking of additional future climate impacts. But there's still a blind spot regarding existing homes which are already significant overheating risk and which will dominate the housing stock for years to come. This is also true within the healthcare system where there is only limited tracking of overheating within critical healthcare sites such as hospitals, care homes, or GP surgeries. And these are often occupied by some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Local communities have a key role to play in adaptation but currently the overall level of planning for adaptation is still limited within most councils. While the concern about the impacts of climate change are rising within the population, more information and engagement will be needed to best prepare local communities for extreme weather and to help people understand how best they can minimize the risks of damaging impacts to themselves and to their families. Finally, within the business and finance sectors, more companies are reporting on their climate risks under corporate disclosure frameworks than ever before but the inclusion of adaptation and the quality of reporting on it needs to be significantly improved. Common standards and frameworks can be important here with the key leadership and coordinating role falling to government, working together with industry. There is some good overall progress to embed adaptation in financial regulators' activities but it is still at an early stage. Overall, the inclusion of adaptation in financial reporting, regulation, and institutions is not yet sufficient to drive investment. Considering our assessment now in the round, we find that while the level of incorporation of adaptation into planning is creeping up across the board, with most sectors now having some, albeit often basic incorporation of climate change within relevant plans and policies, evidence of tangible progress in reducing exposure and vulnerability to climate change is lacking across the board. Key policy gaps remain in all sectors in this report and we provide a detailed set of recommendations on how some of those gaps can be closed over the next few years. It's clear that the current national adaptation program has not adequately prepared the UK for climate change. The current national adaptation program did not address all the risks from climate change identified in the previous climate change risk assessment. It suffered from a lack of ambition and did not embed a focus on adaptation delivery across government to drive an effective overall response to the challenges of climate change. This now needs to change. If the next national adaptation program which is suspected this summer falls short, it risks another lost five years of ineffectual adaptation action, which the UK's people, ecosystems, and infrastructure cannot afford as the extreme weather impacts seen in the last year clearly show. Six requirements that Chris highlighted a few minutes ago can form a basis for a strong new program. The next national adaptation program must be much more ambitious than its predecessors and lead to a long overdue shift in focus toward the delivery of adaptation action on the ground. It must permanently and fully embed adaptation across government and within all relevant policies and strategies. It must also put in place the enabling conditions needed to drive adaptation investment by businesses and financial institutions. The government must now deliver on this challenge and demonstrate that the UK's approach to adaptation policy is fit for purpose and able to drive real reductions in exposure and vulnerability to climate risks that we urgently need. I'm now going to hand over to India Burke from the new statesman who's going to moderate the Q&A discussion. Welcome to the Q&A section. I'm India Burke, environment correspondent at the new statesman and I'll be chairing the discussion for around the next hour. I'm rejoined by Baroness Brown, chair of the adaptation committee and Richard Miller, the CCC's head of adaptation who you've heard a little from already. Plus we also have from the adaptation committee Professor Natalie Seddon, who is professor of biodiversity and founding director of a nature-based solutions initiative at the University of Oxford. She also attends the mitigation committee of the CCC and is the committee's expert on nature. I have a few general overview questions that it would be great to get the panel's various thoughts on and then we will open it up to the floor and drill down into some of the detail. There are 13 sectors I believe covered by the report from energy to health to finance and it would be great to touch a little on each. So do submit your questions using the Slido app, which should now be visible on your screens. So to begin, the report shows that we've had a lost decade on adaptation during which DEFRA just hasn't delivered the planning or the policies or even the monitoring required. So I'd love to ask each of you simply to summarize why you think there hasn't been the necessary progress to date, what it is that primarily has held ambition up. Baroness Brown, could you kick off for us? I think there are an awful lot of barriers that have held up progress. I think one of the very important ones is that the other government departments see this as DEFRA's problem and quite a lot of the issues we have are in things like, how are we making our electricity system resilient? How resilient is our water system? How resilient are our towns and cities? You know, these are problems for our, which is now our energy and energy security and net zero department, our department for leveling up and homes and communities and things. And they haven't seen it as their problem. So we need DEFRA to be able to be much more influential and to really get that Chris Stark mentioned to really get that cross government working going. And it would be good to see the government's, the Cabinet subcommittee on climate change really driving this across government to get all government departments working together on this. Richard, is there something you'd like to add to that? Maybe any more detail on how that cross party, cross government initiative can kick off? Yeah, thank you. I think what I would add would be on making this tangible. I think climate change and particularly the adapting to climate change side can often feel a bit challenging, a bit uncertain about exactly what we're wanting to see happen there. And that's really why we've tried within this report to be more clear than we've ever been on. What are some of these tangible changes that we think do need to be delivered? Outcomes that we can identify and clearly track in the real world that we think government can start to try and get its head around. So, you know, that challenge of getting the rest of government engaged. You know, we want the work we've done in this report, those monitoring maps, which we spoke about in the presentation just a minute ago, to be a useful tool, really, to try and get that engagement within these real, substantive, tangible aspects of resilience that we think is needed. And hopefully that's the thing that can kind of help it move more towards how we treat the net zero problem, where we don't say go away and deliver net zero. We say these are the building blocks. These are, you know, reducing our sales of fossil fuel cars to zero by the early 2030s, finishing the decarbonisation of the power sector. For instance, we try to outline what we think are some of these key parallels in the adaptation space, which can maybe make this a bit easier for governments to get its teeth into in the future. And Natalie, what do you see as the biggest obstacle to action? Well, in terms of action on policy changing, I think, you know, we're wanting our lands and our coastal waters. We're wanting these sort of ecosystems on which we depend to do so much, aren't we? We need them. We're expecting them to produce food, fiber. We're expecting them to sequester carbon, house and transport people. We're expecting them to store in clean water, support our mental health, and we're expecting them. And we need to enable them to increasingly protect us from the impact of climate change. So balancing all these needs is a really, really tough thing to do. And it requires vision. It requires we ensure that the very best science is informing policy, which it often isn't, and that's often a real issue. It requires local participation because action is very, very place-based and policy needs to be enacted at the local level. You know, and it's really difficult. There are lots of vested interests to navigate. So it requires incredibly strong leadership and a vision. And as has already been said, it really does require that joined-up government, getting out of silos, different ministries and departments, working together, realising that building resilience, building healthy, flourishing seascapes and cityscapes and landscapes is everybody's responsibility. We need to work together. I think one of the other reasons is a lack of appreciation of the cost of not doing anything. And the economic impacts both at a local level and a national level of not acting on building on resilience and adaptation and not looking after our working lands and seas properly. And the economic evidence that's a bad thing to do is amassing all the time. And yet it's sort of ignored. So that sort of stopping action on policy, I think, from my perspective, at least some critical things in terms of then, you know, but you can have amazing policy. It's then about, you know, how does that policy translate into action on the ground? You know, even with good policy, we need funding. The policy needs to be backed up by a robust, you know, tractable, doable plan. And we need to then support the people on the ground, be it farmers or other land managers. We need to support them with more finance and with capacity and understanding of the tools that are available. So I think there's a lot of really, really real great challenges there that we need to see addressed. Thanks for outlining those various levels. An important context perhaps for this discussion is tomorrow's news, the government is going to announce its so-called Green Day or energy security announcements on the UK's net zero strategy. And I was wondering if you could give an idea of how political engagement on adaptation compares to progress on mitigating emissions so far. And also perhaps how we can talk about preparing for the impacts of climate change without taking pressure off the need to lower emissions. Baroness Brown, it'd be great to hear your thoughts on that. Well, political engagement on adaptation is far less than it is on mitigation. It really is the Cinderella of climate change, as I regularly call it. We do see little spurts of political engagement, you know, when we have a flood somewhere and ministers turn up in their green wellies to show their interest and their sympathy for people. But as soon as that goes away, really, we, you know, the political engagement drops off quite fast. And that's a real challenge. I think it's absolutely critical that we emphasize, I think, as you were hinting, that this is not about adaptation or mitigation. I think we need to remember that if we can get to net zero by 2050 or 2060, and, you know, we all indeed hope we can globally, because it's so important. That means we have another 30 years of temperatures continuing to rise. So we don't stop the rising temperature until we get to net zero. And it's those rising temperatures that are driving the climate impact. So we've got another 30 years of increasing climate impacts, which are getting more and more devastating. So it's both adaptation and mitigation. And if we don't do the mitigation, then we rapidly get into a situation where adaptation won't be enough and much, much more drastic changes will have to take place. A situation we absolutely don't want to get to. So we've really got to get everybody thinking it's adaptation and mitigation. We have to think about it together. And we are very keen to see government really thinking about integrated policy. So when you're looking at insulating people's homes so that they can have heat pumps at the same time, you're looking at making sure that the shading in those homes to protect them from overheating, that the ventilation, the indoor air quality is all being looked at at the same time. When we're building this new zero carbon electricity system, which we're going to have by 2035 or which is going to have to double in size by 2050, as we're building it, we're making sure it's resilient to the changes in the climate. Whether that's resilient to periods of wind drought or resilient to periods of very heavy storms that bring down overhead wires. By the time we get to 2050, it won't be acceptable to leave a million people without electricity for a week because their transport will depend on electricity, their heating will depend on electricity, their communications depend on electricity, their lighting depends on electricity. Their lives will be pretty much electric. And so we will need much, much stronger standards in order to make sure that we're building a system that is going to be resilient to everything the climate is going to throw at it. Now we're capable of doing that, but it does mean that the government needs to, for example, to give the regulator off-gem the power to make sure that that resilience is being built into the system. And while we're building that system, which we're doing at the moment, we need to have those thoughts up front. So we need that integrated policy across government that's thinking of both adaptation and mitigation at the same time, or we won't deliver net zero successfully, let alone many of the other government's other policy goals. Thank you for that. It was reminding me of, was Antonio Gutierrez used the phrase everything everywhere all at once in relation to the IPCC report the other week and sums up, I think what you were saying as well, and keeping both in mind. Natalie, the report puts a lot of emphasis on nature and land use, which we also talk about in terms of mitigation and adaptation as well. Could you give a little more detail on why these areas are so important to get right? And also perhaps why they seem to be causing some problems for the government have been repeated delays on announcing how policies such as public money for public goods are going to work and what challenges keep propping up here. Thank you for the question. Look, I think there's abundant evidence now from science and practice that healthy ecosystems whether they're natural, semi-natural whether we're also including our working lands our croplands and our timberlands if they are healthy, in other words if they're connected and they're rich in abundant species then they're much more resilient to the impacts of climate change and they're much more able to adapt in the face of climate change. So that starts the sort of the key piece but critically for adaptation they're also much more able to support human adaptation societal adaptation to climate change by providing a whole range of so-called benefits or ecosystem services to people such as by reducing flood risks in our water catchments and on our coastlines, cooling our cities supporting agricultural productivity by supporting pollinators and other important services controlling our pests and so forth. Nature has these sort of cross-cutting effects and it's health of nature, health of our ecosystems affects its ability to build resilience across all sectors. I'd argue and I think the science is very strong on that that we need healthy, biodiverse nature healthy, biodiverse landscapes and seascapes more than ever and yet the UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world and the state of nature on land and in the sea as we describe in our report is either in sharp steep decline or flat lining at a low level at the very best with evidence that pressures from flooding droughts and perhaps also wildfires are intensifying with there being very, very little action on the ground to mitigate these. And we know that if you work with nature if you implement nature-based solutions you can reduce risks while bringing many other benefits including for levelling up and for the economy more broadly. And yet, there's no real plan to increase their implementation at scale across the UK. It's all our responsibilities to do this and yet then it's not, I think the reticence I mean, I think I kind of addressed that in my first comments is that it is extraordinary complex thing to do. We need a lot from our lands and our seas. There's lots of vested interests. I think those are some of the reasons for why we see not enough progress in this, but we don't have any we don't have much time to get us on to sustainable trajectory. So we really do need to address this urgently. Thank you. And final question for me before we there's tons of super questions coming into Slido. So final one for me for the minute is what happens if the government continues to ignore the committee's advice? And a first part of the question for Richard, simply what's at stake? What's at risk in terms of our daily life and the impacts on it? And then also for Baroness Brown in terms of what is there anything that can be done to ensure the committee's advice is acted upon in a way that it hasn't been to date? Yeah, thanks. So I think a huge amount is at stake. So as Chris outlined in his remarks at the start there that the last risk assessment we did in 2021 identified 61 different risks and opportunities from climate change. And those really cut across all areas from some of the nature impacts that naturally we're just talking about and what that means for then trying to maintain productive agriculture and forestry sectors within the country impacts on our infrastructure where those heat impacts were made clear last year where we saw those periods in mid July where rail failures were common, yeah, other impacts on our transport systems. And we also are thinking about the classic, the risks for the UK like flooding, flooding risk will keep rising unless we really start to sort of include that as a default within our planning assumptions. And to draw out some cross-cutting themes from that, I'd say sort of the big thing that at risk if we don't get on with it now is locking. So if we build homes that are not fit for the future climate, both on the heat side so that they're comfortable to live in, safe to live in in the kinds of heatways we see in future then we risk those climate impacts and we also risk just more expense in tackling the problem later. It's gonna be more expensive to retrofit these things and to do it now. The same on our flooding and designing our infrastructure. Baroness Brown already spoke about the big program of infrastructure build out that's gonna be needed in some of these areas for net zero a doubling of the size of the electricity system. It just makes so much more sense that it's gonna be a lot more cheaper to take that opportunity now of building this in at the ground. Putting climate resilience as a fundamental part of that system to mean that we have confidence that it's gonna keep delivering giving it sort of critical societal role if in the kinds of weather and wind extremes we might see in future for instance. So I think it's really that missed opportunity that's gonna cost both us financially but also cost us in terms of climate impacts on our health, on our nature, on our wider society if we don't tackle it now take those opportunities where they're presented to do this up front to take it on today with the urgency that the events of last year really show that we need to. And Baroness Brown, what can be done to make sure that the committee's advice is acted upon this time? Well, what we try and do to make sure our advice is acted upon is to make sure it has as Natalie has said the really strongest scientific base and that it really uses all of the science and evidence to make our case. We will make our case to government departments. We will make our case to committees of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. We're appearing at the Environmental Audit Committee coming up shortly. We've seen our concerns about the security, the resilience of the energy system picked up by the committee on national security who've made a very strong case that the government needs to take notice of our recommendations. So by doing a good job and having it based on very sound science and assessment we create a ripple effect and a pressure. And of course this launch is all part of doing that. And that's how the Climate Change Committee has worked very effectively. And we also need the public to pick up the noise, to be raising this with, we have an election coming up in two years time. We want the public to be raising this with their potential MPs in doorstep conversations. We know how concerned the public are about climate change. We need to be raising, getting them raising the fact that they recognise it's not just reducing the emissions, it's actually addressing the impacts and maintaining the UK as a liveable place despite the impacts that we're seeing. Thank you. The top voted question that we have on the slide oh so far, one from Johnny and he asks what specific measures can the UK government make to increase investment in climate adaptation? And I suppose there's a bit of a second question here to do with increasing public investment and encouraging private investment. Richard, is that something you'd like to speak to? I know it's a very broad question but if you have some specific examples of ways investment can be upped. Yeah, happy to. And just ahead of our progress reports in the start of February we produced a separate report looking specifically at this question of investment and what's needed to help sort of drive the adaptation actions that we want to see. And really what I'd say in answer to the question is I think government needs to see its role in the round in supporting investment. So that clearly means providing public funding where public funding is going to be a really key bit of building climate resilience particularly for those areas where the benefits are widely distributed, the public goods as it were. So that means a critical bit of improving our state of our nature is going to require public funding. Things like flood defences is a strong case for that. So government needs to resource that in sustainable, long-term and predictable fashions that can mean that that public funding can flow. But thinking about it in the round there's big bits of the adaptation challenge that are going to be private and going to be delivered by businesses, by households and in that area it's about thinking about what are some of the barriers. So in the report we looked at quite a few of the different barriers we document and one of the ones that really jumped out for most of the key areas was this question of cash flows. Can you find a way to make this an attractive investment opportunity for the private sector? And there are various different things we think government could be doing there to help unlock those cash flows as well as deal with some of the other barriers around information understanding of these adaptation opportunities. So that might involve things like regulations or things like the net, the requirement for net biodiversity gain that can create markets for some of these resilience outcomes that we'd like to see, creating resilience mandates for regulators which Brown has already spoken about as being a key area where we can then pass that mandate through to private water companies, through to operators in the electricity system to require them to invest where it's needed to support the resilience. So I think it's practically in the round seeing that public piece has been really key to it but we need to start thinking about this in a broader sense. How can we make it attractive for private sectors and for households to be investing in it if we're gonna get to where we need to overall? And just on the subject of investment just to stick on that for a second longer question from Martin Lewis. What are the expected investments in ensuring the adverse health impacts are considered within the plan? So I think this is getting at how do we kind of make sure that health is considered and supported through investment? I know there's many parts of that but what would you think the top ones are Richard? Yes, I think some of the top ones are well, I guess the health impacts from climate change arise from various different sources and this heat related one is a key part of it as we saw last year where we saw around nearly 3000 excess deaths that we can link to those more extreme temperatures we saw throughout the summer. So part of tackling that is gonna be about investing in our housing stock for instance. So that means our homes where people sleep particularly exposed to those nighttime highs that can be particularly damaging on a health side are kept as low as possible. So some of that needs come from households to think about how they can invest in their own properties where they can benefit but there's also a public role there for social housing making sure those are sort of good quality standards for people who might be the poorest and least able to pay in our society but also thinking about critical healthcare settings. So there's some tracking of heat in hospitals now that we note in the report but other critical healthcare settings such as care homes, GP surgeries for instance we really don't have a sense of what extent overheating is happening there. We know from anecdotal evidence that it is happening and that will have impact on our health outcomes because it's often the most vulnerable people who will be residing in those locations and a proper funded public program to ensure that when we're building new healthcare sites that we're thinking about those heat risks thinking about the hospitals that we're building and are they gonna be safe for people to be in in the middle of the century when we expect them to be around is a key bit of it and also thinking about what funding we need to retrofit the hospitals we have now because a lot of those will still be around for decades to come and often those are some of the ones that are the most exposed to heating already today. Thank you so much, but yes please do come in. Thank you and let us not forget those well demonstrated cooling benefits of bringing blue and green infrastructure into our city. So bringing expanding green spaces I mean trees and other green structures provide really important cooling benefits during those heatways as well as bringing enormous benefits for mental health again we're very well demonstrated so there's always this is multiplicity of benefits that impact health that can flow from making space for nature in our cities which also reconnects people with nature which also has benefits that are very, very appropriate and suitable for in a rapidly warming world or much needed I should say in a rapidly warming world. Thank you and Baroness Brown. I think that the challenge of putting a figure on health is as both Richard and Natalie have emphasized is that people's health comes into really all of the climate change impacts. I mean if we look at flooding we know the appalling mental health impacts that people whose homes are flooded and who are unable to get back into them for a long periods of time and we know that disproportionately affects people who are less well off people whose homes are less well insured or maybe even not insured at all and who then take longer to get back into their homes and lose more of their property and we know that people from low income backgrounds see something like eight times more mental health problems from bringing recovering from flooding than those from more affluent backgrounds. So flooding affects people's health. So heat affects people's health very directly. Lack of access to nature affects people's health. All of these things impinge on health. It runs right through climate change and so it's very hard to put a number on that but the sort of number that in our report on investment for a well-adapted UK that Richard mentioned is that over the next decade we really do need to be starting to invest something probably between 15 and 20 billion per annum in adaptation in order to make sure that we have resilient nature, resilient people and a resilient economy in the UK. And taking that point about how health spans all these different issues, how can the infrastructure of government better tackle this issue and how can departments better coordinate something? I know the report touches on a lot in the fact that you've given guidance, not just to Dathra, but you've identified the different departments that need to take responsibility for each area. There's a couple of questions on the slider that are all feeding into this. One is, should there be a Secretary of State for Climate Change and Adaptation? Should responsibility move from Dathra to the Cabinet Office? And one here about, is the creation of a new department for net zero? What impact could that have on the UK's government policy priorities? There's a range there but if you have thoughts on that key issue of how the infrastructure of government could help tackle adaptation, that would be great. Well, we've certainly in the past, talked about this being something that might be coordinated from the Cabinet Office because it's about, you know, the safety of the UK population basically. The challenges that the Cabinet Office isn't really a delivery department like other government departments, but it certainly is the kind of thing you might well put into its remit. And the other option that, of course, that if you're creating a department for net zero, because we so much want to see that net zero and adaptation are integrated in policy making, that again might well be a good place to put this responsibility because a net zero department will need to be engaging with every other government department. And so if it had the adaptation strand as well, you know, that could work very effectively. And I think both of those two are workable suggestions. I think it's in a way, it's up to governments to decide how to do that. But we also, of course, have this Cabinet subcommittee that was actually put in place in order to help get that integration across government that we need for climate change policy. And we really need to see that being made to work as well. I don't know, Natalie or Richard, do you have any thoughts on the infrastructure issue? Just to add very briefly, I think where our report leaves it is, you know, it's clear this needs to sit at the center of government. There needs to be a range right across Whitehall. And really, I guess it's the gauntlet thrown down to the next National Adaptation Program to demonstrate how that can be done. It needs to be done now if we're going to tackle this with required urgency. There are ways to do that. And yeah, what we'll be looking for really after that program is published is can we see evidence of that? Can we see those cross-government structures that we know are needed to tackle this embedded within that program? And yeah, it's a real opportunity, I think to sort of demonstrate that the architecture we have is fit for purpose to be able to deal with this adaptation challenge. So yeah, we wait to see what's in the National Adaptation Program 3 and we'll be watching out with interest on the governance structure side. And perhaps linked to that and perhaps your answers have already covered this, but you mentioned the need for the government to have an adaptation vision. And now the top question we have at the minute is what would an adaptation vision equivalent of achieving net zero look like? I think there's probably a whole separate conversation about how successful the government's vision for net zero is, but what does that vision mean for you? Baroness Brown. Well, of course, unfortunately, it has to be a much more complex and sometimes a much more sophisticated vision than net zero because we can't identify one number in the global atmosphere that we all need to aim for. But I think it needs to be a vision that starts with the statement that the government is committed to delivering a well-adapted UK. And then we need to, just in the way, actually that the logic of our monitoring approach flows down, we need to say, well, what does a well-adapted UK look like? Well, a well-adapted UK means a number of things. One of those is one which is already mentioned in his talk, which is that there will be plentiful water for people, for the environment, and for business. So what does plentiful water mean? Then we start to come down to, well, how would we measure whether we have plentiful water? And we would need to think about, in a way, perhaps how frequently would we be prepared to have a significant drought? Would it be acceptable that we might have significant drought conditions once every 30 years in 2050? And maybe we have to accept that's something we would need to experience. That would then perhaps translate to saying, well, today we need to be designing our systems for what today might be a one in 300 year drought resistance. So in order, we need to be thinking about what are those statements that describe a well-adapted UK? What are the areas that are going to be important? And then turning them into metrics, into standards that then government can put policy in place to deliver. And the great thing about having that vision and then the policy and the standards and the regulations that are needed to deliver it is that that's what draws in investment. That's how the mitigation side of the Climate Change Act has worked once the government has said that we're going to decarbonise the electricity system completely by 2035. That brings in investment because people know that investors know that has to happen and therefore these projects will go ahead. The government will bring in the policy that will make sure these projects give a return on investment because otherwise they're not going to deliver that vision. So having that clear vision, having it kind of flow down into targets so that we can have policy and measures is the way for people to understand and for businesses to understand what's going to happen and also the way to draw in the investment we so crucially need to make those changes that we've talked about. Thank you. And I imagine there's a lot of people who work in local government in the audience because there's a whole really interesting slew of questions about how far local government should be leading on adaptation, how important local government action is and things like what should the role of mayors be. Natalie, how... No, no. I know you deal with kind of land use mings and that's one of the things that intersects with it but maybe Richard, when you were working on the report what kind of balance do you think you identify is working or not working between local and central government at the moment? So local government I think is absolutely key to delivering what we need to see on preparing for climate change. So many of these changes are inherently local, that sort of spatial scale, what's the geography, the landscape and the industries and activities that exist within particular regions and you really do need that local lens often to really tackle the problems at the source and to really think about what's the most effective solution in the round across different things you're trying to do. So it's absolutely key. But I think we see local authorities are really trying to engage with this. Engagement is definitely stepping out. I think there's more to be done to really get to the attention that's been had on the emissions reduction side, on the adaptation side, similar to the national picture and part of that I think is almost sort of a better understanding which pieces are for local authority. It's probably a sort of again a policy sort of landscape piece there that sort of sets out and connects to this vision of what do we see being delivered by the private sector where the responsibility is really clearly forward to the local authorities? Where is it the national government? Do you have any examples of what you think sits in each? Yeah, so we have this chapter on community preparedness and response within the report for the first time. And a lot of that speaks to local level stuff around communities understanding are they at risk? People within those communities understanding am I living in a flood risk area and what should I do about it? But also to what happens when things go wrong? What happens when floods do happen, when heatwaves and droughts happen? What are those resilience functions? There are local resilience forum that is set up that try and tackle these questions and making sure those are adequately funded, adequately resourced and of a real sort of, yeah, clarity on what their role is and how it interacts with other structures such as environmental agency and more sort of national level ones is really key there. So that would be part of it. And then the other thing to say as well is that we know there's also a lot of really good stuff happening at local level too. Through the last year actually we did a whole series of exercises where we went to particular locations around the UK, talked to people working on these issues within local authorities. And as well as hearing about some of those challenges it's really obvious that there is some great stuff happening often at quite a localized and specific level. So I think there's also an important bit of the challenges is figuring out how do we learn the lessons of where things are working at local level and how can you scale them up to be able to enable others to be able to apply them more widely. Do you have any specific examples of things you've seen that are working and how they might be scaled? Well, so we've had, so in our investment work for instance we've looked at some different local projects on nature-based solutions for instance that try and look at the multiple benefits of nature-based solutions for climate resilience for biodiversity, for carbon sequestration. So there's some interesting projects that you can point to. There's one that we've used as a case study from the Wyre Valley for instance of how, at least trying to tackle some of these questions of how can you make that a financially attractive option for investment. So I think really it varies a lot between sectors but there's a lot of richness there if you sort of dig into that sort of local evidence landscape and it's a challenge for a report like this that has to take a national lens to really be able to pull all that through. But I think it's really important that we do look at those examples of where things are working as well as where they're not and try and learn those lessons. Oh, right, sorry. I thought the way it goes green on screen. I thought Barrett Ernest Brown wanted to say something but perhaps maybe she or someone who has a thought there's an even more specific question here which is are there any counties or administrations that show what good looks like yet in the adaptations sphere? So again, just for many of you really, is there anything that kind of gave you hope when you were compiling this report I suppose? Well, I think from some of our interactions with councils we've seen some great examples of councils trying to do things. One that are not particularly in compiling this report but one that we've mentioned before is Kent where they've been doing great things with local farmers to help them to adapt to the changing climate and think about growing different things, think about growing more soft fruit. We've also heard of course about all of the interest of the French champagne houses of coming to the UK to grow grapes because we now have in the South of England better conditions than they do in parts of France for growing the grapes that produce champagne. It'll be interesting to know what it's called if the grapes get grown here but also they'd been looking at with European funding to get some very innovative solutions for putting in more street trees to provide shading, to encourage people to walk on the pavements in hot weather not to take their cars. And we do know that under street trees pavement temperatures can be several degrees lower than unshaded streets. And they've been thinking about combining the street trees with sustainable drainage systems so that there were channels under the pavement where the water from people's rooftops was coming to reach the roots of the trees and make sure they were kept watered. And they were also looking at doing that around areas for example, where they had care homes where you were providing the right conditions to encourage those elderly people who were able to get out and come for a walk in comfortable conditions even in hot weather. So a wonderful kind of integrated systems picture of how do we do placemaking in a hotter world and make the kind of wonderful townscapes that Natalie was talking about. But unfortunately those sorts of things tend to be done as demonstration projects because local authorities don't currently have the funding to actually implement those things on a large scale. And that's one of the big challenges. We need that recognition that climate change is local because weather is local as Richard has said the conditions are local. Local authorities know all about those things. They are very well positioned to implement. We need to give them national frameworks but we need to give them local ability to make decisions and change those frameworks to some extent if they're needed locally but also the funding to implement them. And it's been great to see some of the visioning that has been going on around different parts of the country about what placemaking looks like in this hotter world. Natalie, could I come to you just on that note to read the bigger central government visions which local action can then take place within. And one of these obviously is the land use framework that the report talks a lot about. The need to link up action support for climate and support for nature, support for reducing emissions and for livelihoods and jobs. And why is it important to have that joined up kind of vision at a national level in terms of getting a change on the ground? Yeah, thank you for the question. It's incredibly important that we have a coherent plan or set of possible scenarios for how we manage our lands and coastal waters in the UK. If you just focus on one particular outcome, for example, carbon sequestration, or we just focus on mitigation and this definitely builds on what Julia was saying earlier. If you just focus on that, you can get outcomes which compromise all the other things we need our lands and seas to do. So you need that holistic vision, otherwise you get these negative outcomes. So myopic focus on carbon might produce crops being grown for biomass. It might produce crops or single or low diversity tree plantations, which might be good at sequestering carbon in the very short term, but actually have very low resilience over the long term because they contain few species and are vulnerable to pest diseases and fires and so forth. Whereas if your goal is sort of like the broad suite of adaptation and mitigation benefits that you can get from particular interventions in the landscape, including sustainable food, crop production, livestock production, then you're not gonna get those so much. Now, this is a difficult thing to do. It requires sophisticated modeling requires more research, more funding to research, improved data sets. All of that is actually improving all the time. So there's a real need to bring that together and develop this land use framework. Any map that might be published is wrong in the sense that there are multiple ways of getting where we are now in a very degraded climate vulnerable landscapes and cityscapes to where we need, being part of flourishing landscapes and cityscapes. There's not one route to get from A to B. So we need to sort of be open to the fact that we need to explore different options and we need to bring in all the different stakeholders and their perspectives as well in order to do that modeling well. So any land use framework has to sort of be from the bottom up because whatever intervention you have, whatever adaptation benefits you might bring are going to be very place-based as we've discussed but it also does need that sort of more scientific top-down modeling approach as well. So bringing that together, so bringing the natural and the social science together to produce a framework which reflects different possible outcomes which are going to vary with different climate impacts and different situations in trade and geopolitics. And it sounds like it's too complicated to be doable but actually we do have the technology and the science to be able to do a really good job. So but we need to have that holistic view otherwise we'll compromise food security by over-prioritizing net zero or we'll compromise biodiversity and resilience by really focusing on the food security. All these challenges are interlinked so you need that overview and we need that guidance. Really important that land use framework is good that considers the synergies in trade-offs and is made available as soon as possible. Perhaps one thing I'd love to get all of your thoughts on is how far adaptation is also going to require change in public habits. And while we're on the subject of land and food, do we need to change what we eat? Dietary change is something the government seems very cautious about talking about even but obviously livestock impact on land and adaptation all kinds of things is a big issue. So I suppose the first part of the question is how will public behaviors possibly need to change to adapt for a different climate world? And second, what can the government do to kind of help enable that conversation to take place in a constructive way? Go on Natalie. I mean, we need systemic change at all levels from the individual level through how we behave as individuals to how we run the economy. Because business as usual in how we behave as individuals and run the economy has produced the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis has produced food and security crisis and so forth. There's a very clear need that we all need to consume a lot less. We also need government to enable that too. So we need action and systemic change from both angles. And there's a lot of lots of people are saying there's anything I can do personally and consuming less, consuming making much more sustainable consumer choices being really careful about what you buy and where the stuff that you're buying comes from. There is strong evidence that we do overall need to see a shift towards more plant-based diets to free up space for nature so that it can, for its own right, but it's also so that it can support us in a warming world. So, you know, there is, and then that's a very, you know, this also brings very well-demonstrated health benefits too. You know, what's bad for the planet tends out to also be fairly bad for us as well. And it feels like when it comes to individuals and the general public on nature, we are, you know, there's a great deal of will and determination to try and make things better. We were just last week, you know, the audience might be aware that, you know, it was the publication of the UK's First People's Plan for Nature, which was the result of the UK's first citizens assembly for nature. Very diverse group of people from all over the UK, all different regions, rural, city-based farming communities there as well as businesses, all basically working together to come up with a plan for nature and agriculture in general. So it feels like there's will in the country, there's will in the people and that, you know, the government really needs to listen to the people and listen to the science as communicated through reports such as this in order to really do some of those more challenging transformative systemic change that we know needs to underpin all this action. Sticking, it's such an important subject just to stick on it for a moment. Richard, are there any, apart from kind of diets and the obvious issue of meat and livestock, is there any other kind of particularly controversial issues? I don't know, things like coastal, the risk, coastal flooding poses to housing and relocating people. What are the kind of really thorny, knotty decisions that adaptation throws up? And then, Baraneth Brown, I don't know if you have thoughts on the utility of things like citizen assemblies and the need for things like that in order to kind of get policy moving in the direction it needs to. Yep, so I'm happy to take those. So I think really across the areas we look at in the reports, there's roles for people in many guises. I think one of the key ones is doing things themselves and often that connects to climate risks around your houses, around your property, where you live, for instance. So that's kind of things like understanding when heat wave happens, how do you manage the internal temperatures of your house so it doesn't get very hot? Like when should you be opening your windows, keeping them shut, closing the curtains, et cetera? Better awareness and understanding. So people know what's the right thing to do there is important, part of the action. There's also other bits in homes. So if you live in an area of flood risk, it's about knowing you need to sign up to flood risk alerts and where they come from so you can do that on water. Reducing demand was one of the outcomes we talked about there. So that does mean understanding better what behaviors are particularly water-intensive, what adjustments can be made that might make a difference particularly during periods of drought and also prioritizing things like water-efficient appliances in your house, for instance. So there's some quite direct actions for people. A Roth often connected around buildings there, other ones throughout the other sectors as well. But then the other side I think is the engagement with the issues and you talked about that issue of coastal change and that's I think a really good example of where we know there are gonna be bits of our coastline that are gonna be very difficult to defend. You know, examples in Wales, for instance of the Fairborn being the sort of archetypal one here that people talk about. And you think that, yeah, there's definitely a lot more that needs to be done there to really engage people with those processes, make sure there is a done in a truly sort of consultative fashion and that people feel like they're engaged. And to ensure that it is done in a fair way but also it feels fair to people. So I think that that public engagement around some of those, as you said, particularly naughty, particularly challenging bits of the pieces, yeah, it's really important and an area where, yeah, we highlight, you know, there needs to be a bit more attention, bit more thought around how that works across the next program. And then, Baris and it's Brown, is there a risk that kind of fear, government fear of telling people what to do maybe kind of is slowing some of this behavior change? And is there ways of countering that? Well, I think government needs to recognize it has a hugely important role in communication and education here. So that people do understand what is coming that they aren't able to think, well, it might not happen or it's too far into the future. I think there needs to be much better public information. I think Citizens Assembly is a very good way of doing that but actually it only really engages a very small number of people. It's a good way of communicating those people and getting a sense of public opinion, but we need actually, we need much more investment in communication. And that starts right at school level in making sure this is a proper part of our education system as well. And not just in geography and chemistry or something like that, but it, you know, it's recognized just as it's cross-government, it's recognized that this is a real cross-curricular issue that people need to understand and see in schools. So, you know, I think government has to take on board that it has that leadership role in terms of communication and making sure the British public understands and also making sure, as Richard has said, people understand what it is they can do for themselves and they need to do for themselves and what government can do and what government will do because government can't do everything. And then there's a couple of more policy-specific questions that have risen to the top of Slido, which understandably because they touch on there's such important issues and one's linked to housing and when will the government improve standards of building regulations, which is still the main reference point for the building industry. Richard, it'd be great if you could speak a little bit on that and how, you know, even while there's been progress on new bills, it's still a bit lost on kind of how existing buildings need to change. Yes, so one of the areas we do highlight as what we think was really important progress was what's called Pato within the building's regulations, which now does create this obligation that for new buildings, we have to consider overheating as part of their design so they meet a standard there. But yeah, as you rightly highlighted there, in new building is a clear part of the challenge. We need to stop locking in climate impacts by implementing that Pato, making sure it's actually enforced on buildings that are built. But we know that the vast majority of buildings that are gonna be around even in 2050 say are the stuff that's here already. So that's the real blind spot at the moment. We're increasing evidence that a good fraction of those homes do overheat already in the kinds of heat waves we even see today, let alone what's gonna be coming in a couple of decades time when the vast majority of those houses is still around. So yeah, that's, you know, I think that's a real task to government to really explore what levers we have that could help drive up standards within the existing building stock. And a lot of that is around linking back to I think what came from the very start around connecting to the decarbonisation agenda. You know, when we do things like improve energy efficiency in homes to reduce their carbon emissions to maybe enable them to be fitted with heat pump. For instance, we're also thinking about overheating. There are ways that adding insulation could make it worse for overheating. For instance, if we're not doing it in a sensible way, thinking about the ventilation at the same time. So there really are some opportunities there, I think to tackle that within the building stock at the same time as we move through this needed programme of improving the energy efficiency of our homes. So it's finding ways to really get the skills and the understanding out there is a key bit of that. So that when people think about a home retrofit package that the people they're engaging with are also thinking about all those other climate risk sides. And that would be dealt with at the same time. Just for the totally ignorant, what is obviously we know that things like heat pumps help energy efficiency, what helps our adaptation in retrofitting homes? So there's different things. So shading is a key one. We know some of the most effective shading you can have is external. So it's much more common in countries in Europe, for instance, where you might see shutters across windows on the outside. That could work on some existing UK properties. There's some that won't work by the nature of a lot of our windows are designed to open externally. For instance, there's additional challenges there, although there are ways around some of that. But internal shading, so things like even sort of fitting blinds, for instance, can have an important impact. The other one is natural shading as well. So sort of use of trees to actually directly block light from sometimes hitting your brick walls, for instance, just creating them to get really hot. But also things like creepers and vines. The more use of sort of greenness as we spoke around what that can do on streets with reducing the temperatures you see at pavement level if you have trees and water in the design. That's the same at the housing level too. So it's about thinking about those things that can also have these benefits for nature in urban areas and for even increasing carbon sequestration. And then another issue that's a sector that's kind of risen up in people's concern is finance. And there's a question here from Adam L that says, is the TCFD framework and supporting UK legislation sufficient to embed adaptation into financial reporting? Not sure maybe Baroness Brown or Richard, which of you would like to address? I'll start. It's a start. And I think it's good to have it. If you look at the reports that people are producing on TCFD, they are much better on the mitigation part, on the emissions risk part than they are on the physical risk. People haven't yet understood, I don't think, companies haven't yet understood how to report physical risk really well. And so we really do need some examples of good practice in reporting on climate risk. And I think we also need some exemplar scenarios against which companies might be expected to report on climate risk, that sort of thing would be very helpful. So that needs to get to mature and really be strengthened particularly on the climate risk side. And we need to see investment portfolios, we need to see the ability to assess those for the impact on climate risk and whether a portfolio is well adapted. So we need tests to look at investments to see if they're resilient from the point of view of their resilience to the climate risks that are coming. So there's a lot more, I think, financial reporting and financial standards that still need to come in to help stimulate the uptake of adaptation action. I don't know, Richard, do you want to add to that? Yeah, not very much, but just to add, I think something we highlight that, yeah, this increasing disclosure is good to see and disclosure is one of our outcomes and we think that's key. But we also note that disclosure by itself is not gonna be enough to drive the investment into the things that we will want to be invested in more to actually support adaptation across the economy. And some of the things that are happening now hold some of the keys probably to enabling doing that better. So things like the green taxonomy that's being worked on at the moment. Those are the kind of standards that if you're put in place at a robust level and strong set of standards could help really clarify what investing in adaptation means in a frame that's usable directly by that finance community. So there's some real opportunities there that it would be great to see adaptation be fully integrated and fully tackled to be able to enable finance to take that next step, as well as improving the disclosure regimes that's needed. And as part of the disclosure regimes, the Climate Change Act introduces something called the adaptation reporting power so that the government can request all of our critical infrastructure industries to report on what adaptation actions they are taking. Now, the government has only ever once used that power in a mandatory way, and that was the first time. The last two, twice it's been used, it's been voluntary. We very much strongly are advising the government that it needs to make the adaptation reporting power mandatory. So that it needs to broaden it to include, for example, our critical food supply chains so that we actually know what actions our food suppliers, for example, are taking, given that we know that 50% of our imported food comes from areas that are medium to very high risk of climate impacts. So there's a real risk to our food supply. Where the evening standard was telling me last night we were already seeing that increasing prices was a time when increased prices are very challenging already. So hitting the most vulnerable in society as climate change tends to do. So we need to be getting the government to use the teeth it's already got and to use them properly. I think that global note is a really useful one to maybe get some wrap up thoughts from you on in terms of obviously we can adapt here but if we don't also support the rest of the world in adapting there are feedbacks and supply chain links and all kinds of ways that we can't entirely, we're not an island in that respect. So maybe just to close, it would be great to just hear your closing thoughts on what you think is the one thing you'd like to see government change above all to ensure that the next adaptation report is more positive than this one. Well, I'll start with that and saying that the government really needs to have a vision of where it is we're trying to get to. And Natalie? Recognise and the multiple benefits for resilience across all sectors of protecting, restoring in the natural world and more sustainably managing our working lands and plan for the delivery of those multiple benefits. And Richard? I think I would say to really make that integration within broader policies that we often talk about in this space really happen and be really meaningful because I've talked to several times in this about that risk of locking if we don't and as we really start to move through the net zero transition now that many of those things, if we don't tackle them now those opportunities will be missed. So yeah, I'd like to think in a couple of years time we can look at some of those key developments on the electricity system, on housing, on the other bits we've talked about that are going to be affected by these other policy genders and really say that, yes, building climate resilience in as a fundamental feature was done. Thank you all so much. You've covered so much. I'm going to hand over now to Baroness Brown to give a few closing remarks but thank you all so much. That was great. Well, thank you very much, India. So first of all, thank you everyone for joining and submitting such a wide range of interesting questions. I'd like also to thank very much my excellent panel, Natalie and Richard, and India for steering us through all of this and indeed also for the production team who you can't see but have managed to get us through all of this glitch free. So big thanks to all of those. As I mentioned at the beginning, we have adaptation reports for Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. They'll be coming out later in the year. So please do look out for those and that gives you a bit more of a local flavour on adaptation actions. We'll also be responding this summer once the government has published its third national adaptation programme. We'll be having a look through that and providing our response to that. But until then, thank you very much again for your participation and for joining us this morning. Thank you.